“... Romantic movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of ...”

“... the stories were so smuttily school-boyish: in those days, saying rude words in front of nanny took a lot of nerve. Shit features quite a lot in Mortmere – as it does, curiously enough, in An Unmentionable Man. When samples of Mortmere reached Oxford, the court of Auden was spellbound. Stephen Spender later on recalled that ‘just as Auden seemed to us ...”

“... the way some also consider how this habit of dividing the work of a lifetime into distinct periods took hold. Stylistic and biographical conjectures along these lines were common in the 19th century, and they persisted in various forms until fairly recently. Then they came to be regarded as the product of a false consonance between art and the history of the ...”

“... required just under three minutes to make and, as Warhol usually projected them at a slower speed, took slightly longer to watch. At first, these static motion pictures were known around the Factory as ‘stillies’. Eventually, they would be called Screen Tests. In the first instalment of a two-volume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s cinema, Callie ...”

“... and waving green branches – a symbol of grief, cleansing and continuity in Luo culture. It took several hours for the coffin to make the short journey to parliament, as thousands walked alongside the motorcade. The crowds were so large that the public viewing was moved to Kasarani Stadium. But the event quickly descended into chaos. People streamed ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... wear his convict’s uniform once a year. In 1961, 90 years after Stead, a young man who took him as his hero was appointed editor of his old paper, the Northern Echo. At 33, Harold Evans wasn’t quite as precocious as his predecessor, but he came from a world in some ways closer to Stead’s than to England today. In the engaging early pages of My ...”

“... we do. And he caught fifty terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the fifty terrorists, and he took fifty men and he dipped fifty bullets in pigs’ blood – you heard that, right? He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had ...”

“... such as Bede in England and Snorri Sturluson in Iceland: it destroyed the gods’ temples or took them over, cut down the holy oaks and replaced them with crosses, and turned the gentry into patrons of churches and collectors of tithes. These campaigns had clear targets. The guerrilla warfare against people who put out food for the Good Folk, or who ...”

“... assured pastiches which his father transcribed in the Notenbuch. In January 1762, Leopold took Wolfgang, who was about to turn six, and Nannerl, who was 11, to Munich and then Vienna, where he showed them off to municipal bigwigs and royalty, often in exchange for large sums of cash. These extended tours, usually taken without his mother, Anna ...”

“... in trying to find the killer question that would somehow lead to Sturgeon’s resignation. They took evidence in the morning and took to social media in the afternoon. No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ...”

“... dispatched by the infant RAF in 1919 to eliminate the ‘mad mullah’ in British Somaliland took their orders directly from London. But their best efforts, a local British army commander subsequently recorded, left the mullah’s supporters ‘cheerful, utterly defiant, and grossly slanderous about my parentage’. The US strategic bombing campaign in ...”

“... the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a tiny treatise on ‘The Detail of ...”

“... one of them he put into action as follows. One summer evening, as was his custom, Maestro Domenico took his lute and made his way out of Santa Maria Nuova, leaving Andrea there drawing in his room. Andrea had declined his invitation to join him on a walk, saying he had some urgent drawing work to do. So Domenico went off and pursued his usual rounds of ...”

“... chances were sorted out according to their place in the social structure; their very personalities took shape within the forces of socialisation.’ Then things fell apart. Not only in the external world – things have been falling apart, after all, since the onset of modernity; the last quarter of the 20th century was scarcely more fractious than the first ...”